Events

Event Description

Please join the Biology Department for a candidate talk by Professor Nicole Des Jardins.

Climate change, pesticides, and bees: Physiological mechanisms and ecological consequences 

Insect pollinators are critical to both the human food supply and the reproduction of plants in natural environments, but are under threat from a myriad of stressors. Professor Nicole Des Jardins will describe her research into two major anthropogenic stressors for bee populations: climate change and pesticides. She will show how these stressors mechanistically impact pollinators and describe the resulting ecological consequences. First, Nicole will describe recent work on the thermal ecology of pollinators in spring-blooming crop agroecosystems. Through lab-based investigations into thermal physiology and field-based studies of foraging ecology, she will show that the wild bees important to spring-blooming fruit crop pollination are physiologically vulnerable to cold snaps. Nicole will discuss how these findings can be applied to ensure the stability of pollination services as climate change progresses. Second, she will describe the effects of an agricultural fungicide formulation, Pristine®, on honey bee behavior and the underlying physiological mechanisms. Nicole will show that Pristine® negatively impacts honey bee learning performance via effects on carbohydrate absorption. She will also show that Pristine® interferes with successful homing behavior and discuss the consequences for colony fitness. Finally, Nicole will supplement this presentation of past research with future directions to be pursued at Hamilton College. These projects will dive deeper into the evolutionary physiology and ecology of pesticide exposure and climate change in pollinators, working toward solutions that promote pollinator health in both natural and human-dominated ecosystems.

Nicole Des Jardins received her B.S. from the University of Michigan in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and my M.S. and Ph.D. from Arizona State University in Animal Behavior. She completed an NSF-funded postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Entomology at The Ohio State University. Nicole is broadly interested in the physiological and ecological patterns underlying pollinator responses to global change, with a particular interest in applied solutions that promote pollinator health in agricultural, natural, and urban ecosystems.